I am a voracious reader and every week I come across either a book, online piece or website I want to share with others. I’ve decided to curate these gems and highlight them on Friday. I hope you find these faves as insightful as I do.

• “My Friend Sam” by Curtis Sittenfeld in the New Yorker is my must-read for this week. It begins with this question: “If you’re trying to tell the story of a friendship, do you start when the two of you met?” I loved every minute of this poignant essay about love, friendship and loss. h/t Allison Slater Tate

• So much of what Kathleen Harris penned in “What We Write About When We’re Not Writing” resonated. This line gutted me, “You write down things that you never seem to be able to say when it actually matters, and when people need to hear them. As you grow older, you receive more messages about sudden deaths and missed opportunities. The finality is overwhelming to you. You don’t write about that.”

• This interview, Nurturing Craft in an Age of Content: An Interview with Maggie Smith in Upwrite Magazine, reveals how she arrived at her poem, “Good Bones,” as well as other parts of her process.  When she talks about explaining the world to her children she says,  ” I brought two people into a beautiful, broken world, and now it’s my job to introduce them to it. I want to tell them the truth, but I don’t want to overwhelm them. I want them to be careful but not afraid. I want them to believe in goodness but not be oblivious to danger. The world is both wonderful and terrible, and people can be both wonderful and terrible. These complexities are the meat of poems like “Good Bones.” h/t Melissa Uchiyama

• Do you think your inefficient because of motherhood? This Quartz piece, “The Ultimate Efficiency Hack: Have Kids,” by Jenny Anderson articulates the opposite argument. 

What were your favorite reads this week?